Harry Targ
If there is no struggle, there is no
progress. Frederick Douglass
The
problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. W.E.B. DuBois
What a proud contrast to the
environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale. Mitch Daniels
All
across the country students, black and white, hit the streets and the campus
malls to protest racism; structural and interpersonal. One thousand students
rallied at Purdue University on Friday, November 13, to show solidarity with
students at the University of Missouri and to announce 13 demands they were
making to address racism at Purdue; a racism that the university president says
no longer exists.
Of
course nationally and locally the struggle for social and economic justice is
historic. Rev. William Barber, leader of the Moral Mondays Movement, points to
the “Three Reconstructions” in post-Civil War American history. The First Reconstruction
occurred in the 1860s and 1870s when black and white farmers and workers came
together to write constitutions and to create a new democratic Southern
politics. The hope this first reconstruction raised for a truly democratic
America was dashed by a shift to the right of the federal government, the
reemergence of the old Southern ruling class, and the rise of a brutal violent
terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. Racist policies, coupled with
terrorism, instilled formal racial segregation in the South and subtle forms of
institutionalized racism throughout the rest of the country.
The
Second Reconstruction, Barber asserts, was inspired by the Brown vs. Board of
Education Supreme Court decision which declared that segregated schools were
unconstitutional. With militant sectors of labor, a grassroots Southern civil
rights movement revived all across the country. In the 1960s, it culminated in
civil rights legislation that outlawed racial segregation and guaranteed voting
rights. Also the “war on poverty” was launched. Shortly after these victories,
the Republican Party presidential candidate Richard Nixon employed the
so-called “Southern Strategy” to shift federal and state politics to the right.
The forerunners of today’s Tea Party rightwing reaction expanded their
political power at the federal and state levels.
Rev.
Barber believes that, with the movement that elected President Obama, there has
emerged a Third Reconstruction. It features the mobilization of masses of people--blacks and whites, men and
women, gays and straights, blue collar and white collar workers, young and old,
people of faith and those who choose no faith--coming together to reconstitute
the struggle for the achievement of a truly democratic vision. This vision is
of a society that is participatory, egalitarian, and economically and
psychologically fulfilling.
The
resurgence of protests on college campuses, although narrowly focused,
represents the contemporary form of the kinds of struggles for social justice
Frederick Douglass talked about. For
example, on the campus of Purdue University, the struggle for racial justice
has a long history. For the first 60 years of the twentieth century the African
American population was less than one percent of the student body. The numbers of African American students grew
to a few hundred in the 1960s. And in the context of the Second Reconstruction
and activism around civil rights and opposition to the war in Vietnam, some students
organized a “Negro History Study Group”(which later became the Black Student
Union). In 1968, to dramatize what they saw as institutional racism coupled
with an environment of racial hostility, more than 150 Black students carrying
brown bags marched to the Executive Building. At the building they took bricks from
the bags. The bricks were piled up and a sign “Or the Fire Next Time,” was set
next to the bricks. The students submitted a series of demands including the
development of an African American Studies Program and a Black Cultural Center.
The
demonstration was dramatic. The demands clear. The justice of their motivation
was unassailable. Administrators and faculty set up committees to discuss the
protests. And in the short run, only minor changes were implemented, such as
Purdue’s 1968 hiring of the first African American professor in Liberal Arts.
One
year later, after an African American member of the track team was castigated
for wearing a mustache and his verbal response led to his arrest, Black
students launched another protest march with more demands. This time the
Administration and the Board of Trustees authorized the establishment of the
Black Cultural Center, which today is an educational, social, and architectural
hub of the campus. In 1973, Antonio Zamora, educator, accomplished musician,
and experienced administrator was hired to lead the campus effort to make the
BCC the vital embodiment of the university that it has become.
One
of the leaders of the 1969 protest, Eric McCaskill, told then President Hovde
by phone during the protest march and visit to the Executive Building: “We are
somebody. I am somebody.” Forty-six years later one thousand similarly
motivated students rallied together on Friday, November 13 on the Purdue
campus. They expressed outrage at the systematic violence against people of
color throughout the society and the perpetuation of racism in virtually every
institution. On the Purdue campus they protested the lack of full, fair
representation of African Americans on the faculty and in the student body, a
climate on and off campus that perpetuates racism, and the continuation of all
the old stereotypes of minority students that has prevailed for years. They
also shared their solidarity with the students of the University of Missouri
and they made it crystal clear their disagreement with the statement by the
Purdue University President that the Purdue campus was different.
The
organizers provided thirteen demands including:
-an
acknowledgement by the President of Purdue University that a hostile and
discriminatory environment still exists at Purdue
-the
reinstatement of a Chief Diversity Officer with student involvement in the
hiring process
-the
creation of a “required comprehensive awareness curriculum”
-the
establishment of a campus police advisory board
-a
30 percent increase of underrepresented minorities in the student body and on
the faculty by 2019-2020
-greater
representatives of minority groups on student government bodies
Frederick
Douglass was correct. Progress requires
struggle. DuBois is still correct about the twenty-first century as he was
about the prior one: the problem of our day remains “the color line.” And many
of those who observed, participated in, and applauded the organizers of this
latest protest at Purdue believe that the struggles are long, the victories
sometimes transitory, and each generation of activists is participating in a
process of fundamental change that will move society in a more humane
direction. The generations of Purdue students of the 1960s and the second
decade of the twenty-first century are linked in a chain for justice.
